Called a Bluff: On Purpose or Not?

One cannot read any media without questioning every line, and the latest case in point is a piece in the New York Post that proclaims the President "brilliant" for "call[ing] Iran's bluff" with a blockade of the Straight of Hormuz.

In isolation, one could well imagine such a blockade being a useful and powerful tool to further cripple the Iranian regime, and being brilliant for turning its best weapon against it.

Not only that, the move may play out exactly that way. Despite concerns that ships were violating the blockade, for example, a Chinese ship has indeed turned around after appearing to flout it yesterday.

But in context?

Doing something this deliberate would be way out of character for Donald Trump who, to put it charitably, prefers to operate by the seat of his pants, and usually has the sole strategic interest of lining his own pockets. Remember that he was talking hours or days before of collecting tolls from the Strait with Iran as a partner. (!)

So much for the Post's contention that Trump is "honoring an American commitment to freedom of the seas that goes back to President Thomas Jefferson."

Since when has this clown honored any American commitment, including those he himself has made? Our NAFTA USMCA trading partners might like to have a word with you about that.

And then there's the further context of Trump's ever-changing war aims. As of right now, the Administration is hoping to accelerate the fall of strike a "Grand Bargain" with the Mullahs, as if they are fellow mafiosi, instead of ideologues who might be interested in surviving to maim and murder infidels another day.

We may yet end up having to give Trump grudging credit for ridding us of the Mullahs, but he is doing a great job of getting in the way of that, and such an outcome is not guaranteed despite our obscene military advantage over Iran.

A powerful tool still has to be wielded, and preferably by someone who knows what he is doing.

-- CAV

Trump Loses to a Sane Conservative in Hungary

In Hungary, where Trump had sent the Vice President to stump for fellow corrupt Putin fan-boi, Viktor Orban, opposition leader Peter Magyar's party won Sunday's elections so decisively that Magyar will be able to undo much of the harm Orban did to his country over the last sixteen years:

With nearly all ballots counted, Tisza was set to win 138 seats, more than the two-thirds majority Magyar would need to undo Orbán's constitutional overhaul and combat corruption.

"Together we liberated Hungary, we have reclaimed our country," Magyar told tens of thousands of supporters who danced and cheered near the Danube River in Budapest.

Record turnout underscored how many Hungarians saw the election as a watershed moment for their country.

Orbán was celebrated by conservatives across Europe and the U.S. as the mastermind of the "illiberal" model of democracy. But he lost favour at home with voters who grew weary of economic stagnation, international isolation and oligarchs amassing wealth.

"The election result is painful for us, but clear," Orbán said at the Fidesz campaign offices.

For all his many faults, at least Hungary's version of Donald Trump is capable of admitting defeat, and doing do like a man.

Magyar, a former protege of Orban, is what I would call a relatively sane conservative, notably being more in favor of free markets and cooperation with Europe, rather than its enemies in the Kremlin:

Magyar is often described as conservative liberal, combining market-oriented economic views with an emphasis on civic responsibility, rule of law, and national culture. He frequently states that his movement seeks to move beyond the "old left -- right divide" in Hungarian politics.

Magyar has expressed support for adopting the euro in Hungary once the necessary economic conditions are met. He argues that adopting the common currency would strengthen financial stability and Hungary's position within the European Union (EU).[53] Magyar defines himself as strongly pro-European, supporting deeper cooperation within the EU and alignment with Western democratic values. He has criticized the Orbán government's confrontational stance toward EU institutions and its close relations with Russia. [links omitted]

This is good news for Ukraine in particular and Europe in general, given that Magyar will stop Orban's policy of hindering European aid to Ukraine, and it should come as no surprise that Trump's endorsement didn't save Orban:

So what does it say that Orban has been so decisively repudiated by his own electorate -- and that other right-wing populists in Europe are seeing their popularity sag?

For one thing, it shows that Trump's support may be the kiss of death at a time when the U.S. president is recording record-low approval ratings: In a recent YouGov poll, just 14 percent of people in Britain and France had a favorable view of Trump. In Germany, it was 10 percent, and in Denmark, 3 percent. In Hungary, a poll by the Publicus Institute found that 59 percent of respondents believe that Trump is contributing more to global conflict than to peace. That's what Trump gets for his nonstop abuse of European allies [and] his threats to annex Greenland... [links removed]

New York Magazine nicely sums up the lesson for Trump, not that he'll learn anything:

Orbán found out Sunday that it is much harder to lie to people than he'd thought. His control of the television stations couldn't trick Hungarians into thinking their schools and hospitals weren't deteriorating. They didn't believe that only Ukraine and the European Union were to blame for their woes. They looked squarely at the man who had been in charge for 16 years in the way most Americans are now sizing up Trump, who can't blame Joe Biden or the Democrats for a country he has now governed for more than a year. Trump will not get the 16 years in power Orbán enjoyed, but he has dominated the mass consciousness of our nation for more than a decade. That is a very, very long time to think about Donald Trump. Americans are weary, and a growing number of his old supporters -- not the MAGA obsessives but simply those who weren't fond of Kamala Harris, Biden, or Hillary Clinton -- have buyer's remorse. They've had enough. They long for the day when they can treat Trump's party the way Hungarians drubbed Fidesz.

It is a shame that the Democrats will be the big winners here. So far, they seem just as incapable as Trump of offering anything positive to the American voter.

-- CAV

Four Neat Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

I may not post here next Monday or Tuesday owing to major personal obligations.

***

1. I once future-proofed an "obsolete" peripheral by running it with a virtual machine. That scanner is really nice to have at tax time!

Someone else has taken this approach to a whole new level with an unsupported, but perfectly good photo printer that he now shares with his non-Linux-running family:

How the web app works

The core of this app is the amazing v86, which emulates an x86 CPU -- and the whole machine around it -- in a browser. It compiles machine code to WebAssembly modules at runtime, which puts the whole arrangement just the right side of intolerably slow. I make it so this v86 machine runs Alpine Linux with CUPS, Gutenprint and supporting packages.

The browser connects to your printer over WebUSB, retrieving its make and model. It looks for the Gutenprint driver name that's the closest match using trigrams, and sends an lpadmin command over the emulated keyboard to install it.

Then, to print a file, it's uploaded into the emulated machine and an lp print command is sent. And, as if by magic, the raw binary print data produced in the emulated machine ends up at your printer.

The developer is optimistic that his web app will work for "a range of other Gutenprint-supported models."

2. My favorite tactical podcast, The Adam Clery Football Channel, has a nice, short history of soccer jersey numbering conventions (embedded below), starting with the first, odd failed attempt, and following the evolution of numbering conventions after the Football Association's initial assignments by position.

Why do Brits keep calling them center halves? They should know better. They invented the game!

A fun bonus is that fellow non-British Premier League fans who are bewildered by the Britishism centre half will learn why the term is applied by commentators to central defenders.

3. Fellow beer drinkers rejoice! There is now a crowdsourced effort called Pint Patrol that calls out establishments whose "pint" servings fall short.

4. If a trip to Japan beckons, you might wish to review this list of chopsticks faux pas.

I'd also peruse this discussion of same.

Commenters there note that not all of the items on the list are that bad, and that a few are common among Japanese diners themselves.

At least two are marked serious because they resemble parts of Buddhist funerary rituals. If I got nothing else from the list, I'd be sure to avoid those!

-- CAV

A Rainbow for the Right?

You may soon find some of the same people who foam at the mouth at the sight of a pride flag trying to beat you over the head with a rainbow of their own:

A vast network of more than 63,000 connections woven throughout the Bible is drawing renewed attention from believers, with some arguing the intricate links point to divine authorship.

The connections, identified by a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and a Lutheran pastor in Germany, stretch across all 66 books of scripture, linking people, events and themes scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Researchers transformed these connections into a visualization that lays out every chapter from Genesis to Revelation along a single line. Each vertical bar represents a chapter, with taller bars marking sections that contain more verses.

Thousands of curved lines stretch between books to link related passages, with darker lines highlighting verses that share the greatest number of connections. The arcs form a rainbow-like pattern that visually reveals how extensively the Bible is woven together from beginning to end.

Add a little motivated reasoning to the huge number of these vague "connections," a pattern that happens to resemble the rainbow after the Great Flood, and the kind of willful blindness to obvious alternative explanations that would make Tucker Carlson blush, and you have a sort of mini-Young Earth type of "theory:"

One user posted on X: 'That's literally impossible: you can't get 20 people in a room and tell them to write an essay about one topic and get agreement.'

In a video shared by Silverdale Baptist Church in Tennessee, pastor Tony Walliser highlighted how the Bible connects stories across generations while focusing on a central figure, Jesus.

'Now, let me ask you how that just happened?' Walliser said in the video. 'You go wow, it must have had a major, amazing general editor, yeah, it did: God.'

Wait a minute. I thought the Bible was of divine authorship and that god is perfect. But here he is having to edit his work! Hmmmm.

Speaking of contradictions, the fact that the Bible contradicts itself hundreds of times comes up nowhere in the story and will surely be deemed irrelevant (if it comes up at all) by the sort of people who will tout this "analysis" as the kind of "proof" religion has never, and will never, provide.

-- CAV

TWO Complicated Tax Codes, Thanks to Trump

Writing at The Washington Examiner, Anne Rathbone Bradley of the Fund for American Studies ably summarizes America's history with tariffs, as well as the numerous problems Trump's import taxes have been causing.

All this she marshals into the following interesting point:

There is a deeper problem with tariffs. They harm the majority of people while a select few benefit, undermining the core economic framework that's made the U.S. the most vibrant economy in human history. Tariffs erode consumer and investor confidence, increase red tape and volatility, close markets, and ultimately tarnish the rule of law.

Consider the entrepreneur trying to source materials and find customers in this environment. The tariff schedule runs to thousands of line items, changes without notice, and is riddled with exemptions -- available, of course, to those with the right lobbyists. That's not a trade policy. It's a rent-seeking machine.

As Americans prepare for Tax Day, we should realize that the current system of tariffs is making the U.S. economy more like the IRS's tax code -- confusing, arbitrary, costly, and unfair. In other words, if you enjoy the complex tax code, you'll love tariffs. Instead, let's scrap the tariffs and return to economic freedom and free trade. [bold added]

All this is on top of the sin of violating individual rights in multiple ways!

Even if, as Trump claims, import taxes could replace the income tax, what would the point be, if it merely replaces one evil with a very similar one?

I can only imagine that the new taxes allow their openly-corrupt champion to extort bribes that the income tax doesn't.

Upon having these facts laid out, all I can do is (1) congratulate the President on finding a way to make me appreciate something about the income tax, which I hate and have long advocated abolishing, and (2) recommend pointing out this piece to any thoughtful adult who is concerned about tariffs.

-- CAV

Before You Inject Those 'Peptides!...'

Until we see the day that the FDA is dismantled and replaced by a number of competing, credible private watchdog groups, standards bodies, or something like a Consumers Union or Underwriters Laboratories, it will be what practically everyone relies upon for guidance about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

This is part of why having a single government agency is so dangerous to your health: It's a single point of failure that can be made to fail by politicians -- as it is doing so today under Donald Trump, through his reckless appointment of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. as the head of the HHS.

Case in point: Kennedy is working to give the FDA's imprimatur to a number of fashionable nostrums:

RFK Jr is trying to get 14 peptides, without data on safety or efficacy, licensed and approved by FDA. His favorite is BPC-157. "Only three small human studies of BPC-157 exist, for instance, the largest of which is a telephone survey of 16 people who received an injection of the drug for knee pain, and which was published in a third-tier journal, Alternative Therapies."

Regulars here will know that I am both an advocate of one's freedom to use oneself as a guinea pig if one wants and a proponent of making informed decisions about such things.

So it is that, since "peptides" are all the rage these days, I was glad to see Derek Lowe, a research chemist, write about this fad and how dangerous it can be.

After first giving a good general introduction to the scientific meaning of the term peptide in his trademark relatable and humorous way, Lowe gets into the nitty-gritty of using them as therapies, including a discussion of a treatment that is often abused:

And there are going to be plenty of cases where yes, Peptide X sure does do that thing you're interested in, but it turns out that you can't do That Thing without doing other things that you are surely not interested in. A number of "peptides of abuse" these days, for example, seem to be targeting human growth hormone pathways and associated ones, so let's use that as an example. The pitch is often something like "Here's the signal your body uses to build muscle! Take it directly and get going today!", and with HGH there's also been a longstanding subculture that treats it as a Fountain of Youth signal of some kind. "Replenish your growth hormone levels", the idea is, "and dial back the biological clock!"

But growth hormone (and I shouldn't have to say this) is powerful stuff, and it doesn't just go tell your muscles to swell up. It affects bone tissue and many other tissues as well. I would invite anyone looking to maximize their growth hormone levels to look up a condition called acromegaly, which is what you get when your body keeps on making more growth hormone than you strictly need. Bones in the hands, feet, and head enlarge, and you get all sorts of side effects like joint pain, high blood pressure, type II diabetes, and other things that are probably not mentioned in the peptide supplier's brochure.

Excess growth hormone also increases the risk of some types of cancer... [bold added]

Lowe also notably gets into that fave of Bobby K Junior's, "BPC-157."

Lowe ends with his defense of the FDA, which I would heavily qualify as I did at the beginning of this post. To the extent that so many people rely on the FDA for information about drug efficacy and safety in the world as it is today, though, he is spot on.

Trump's appointment of Kennedy is dangerous for that reason and, in my view, is a reason we would work to build strong, competing, non-governmental institutions that inform the public about drug safety and efficacy.

-- CAV

Somin on Citizenship Reform

Ilya Somin writes provocatively on citizenship reform at The Volokh Conspiracy.

I found his piece worthwhile because, as he does, I oppose Trump's effort to oppose birthright citizenship, although I have long thought the United States needs immigration and citizenship reform.

Widespread confusion about the nature of civil rights vs. individual rights muddies this debate, as I noted years ago:

[I]t reminds me of a distinction Leonard Peikoff drew on his radio show some time ago between civil rights -- which belong to the citizens of a country and pertain to their participation in its government and legal system -- and individual rights -- which belong to anyone in a society. An example of a civil right would be the right to vote. Freedom of speech would be an example of an individual right (that a proper government would guard for its citizens).

The distinction is interesting to me because I suspect that in addition to the massive confusion there already is among the public about the nature of individual rights (e.g., from the philosophical roots of the concept to their very nature, as evidenced by the plethora of ersatz "rights," like medical care), there is further confusion about the distinction mentioned above. The most glaring instance I can think of where this confusion hampers intelligent debate is in the immigration debate, and specifically when the very idea of open immigration is equated with treating all comers as full citizens. [bold added]

Somin seems to have such a distinction in mind when he proposes (1) changing the ambit of citizenship to not include voting, and (2) making participation in the government, such as by voting, contingent on competence and revocable on such grounds as insurrection:

... In an ideal system, restrictions on voting and office-holding would be based on competence and (in some cases) there might be exclusions based on a demonstrated danger to liberal democratic institutions (as with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court wrongly gutted, to a large extent). We already have some competence-based constraints on the franchise, such as excluding children, some convicts, and immigrants who cannot pass a civics test most native-born Americans would fail if they had to take it without studying.

...

... the ideal political system would have a strong presumption against restrictions on migration, while also imposing competence-based constraints on voting rights and office-holding...

Somin also argues for restricted access to welfare benefits, which I can only advocate as a stopgap measure until the full repeal of the welfare state, as I have argued before.

I have not thought deeply about this nor am I a legal scholar, but I like these ideas and agree with Somin that, in the meantime, "Birthright citizenship [is] a second-best policy."

-- CAV